Little bit of info about making plugins

[futurepants]

I have been collecting naruto cards since it's release but none of my friends that live by me play, so online gaming is my only option, I worked with OCTGN a bit and it was fine but noone ever updated the game so it is about 5 sets behind.

I was curious about how easy it is to add card info, naruto cards tend to have a ton of separate info (including set info and the image file info 7 for ninja cards) and I am moored by the sheer amount of data input needed to update sets on OCTGN.

So I was wondering whether or not it was faster/easier to do it on lackey, although seeing how pitifully weak the naruto game was done here (1 2 sets i think) I already have a 7-9 set head start so I guess I am wasting time even posting this...

*sigh* I wish people updated... naruto is such a fun CCG but the damn data entry, I am to ADHD to sit and type 7 lines of text per card for 600-800 cards.

[Iceclaw]

You could just include cardname,set, and image and read the text off the images instead of typing it all.

[Trevor]

You could just include cardname,set, and image and read the text off the images instead of typing it all.

True, but the card data is just tab-delimitted text, like Excel uses, so its pretty easy to put in card data (which you can likely find on sites all ready). Open up a card data file and you can see what it looks like in excel.

[Iceclaw]

He can always go back and fill in the data later, I'm just trying to suggest getting it playable, and then fill in the rest over time so it's not so overwhelming adding 700 cards by hand.

[futurepants]

It is so funny how many other people want a naruto plugin, theres a few other posts about it in the first page of topics.

I guess I am just lazy... OCTGN is very easy to update it just takes FOREVER.

Heres a typical naruto card.

<Name> [Naruto Uzumaki (Tailed Beast Mode)]
/
<Element> [Fire]
/
<Attributes> [Leaf Genin Male Clone Status Animal Name: (Naruto Uzumaki) Name: (Nine-Tailed Fox Spirit.)]
/
<Effect Text> [ [Valid] While this Ninja is in injured-status During your mission phase discard one injured status ninja besides this ninja. This ninja is unneffected by your opponents effects.]
/
<combat> [Fang]
/
<P/S> [8/0 9/2]
/
<set> [N678]
/
<img> [n678.jpg]

Now do that 1000 times.

Ugh... even if I copied it from a website most lists have only the text and MAYBE the attributes, if you are lucky. The name obviously.

Then you have to type in the power/support the image link the element and the combat type and set info.

Then you have to split the info up and copy paste copy paste copy paste copy paste

Ugh why do I have such severe anxiety issues...

I am disabled so I have nothing but free time...

I guess I will try to suck it up and update the OCTGN ones, because at least those are 10 sets in or so be4 they got abandoned...

Oh and the reason I have to type it in is because alot of the naruto promos are NOT on the bandai website, and The best quality images I can find are unreadable. and I would have to go back and ADD the attributes to EVERY card because the guy who made the patch left out the attributes effect text which is VERY important in deckbuilding and when you can't search for ninjas with let's say "sharingan eye" out of over 1000 cards it is a pain in the ass to make a deck.

[Chris]

When I did the plugin for Middle-earth CCG I made good use of the regular expressions function in the free program Notepad++ (link) to generate the tab-delimited lists that Lackey uses for its carddata files. Regular expressions allow you to do advanced search and replace actions in which you can search for strings of text using wildcards and such. (Read more here.) Combining this with excell or some other spreadsheet editing programm (I used openoffice calc) you can really cut down on the amount of work needed for editing and copy-pasting. This should enable to transform the information on card like you posted above into a usable format quicker than doing it all by hand (though it'll probably still be a lot of work).
Hope this helps!